Any '90s kids out there?

If you were a youngster in the '90s and had any inclination towards computers and the games they ran, chances are you experienced the golden era of first-person shooters. I remember playing Wolfenstein 3D for the first time at a friend's house and being amazed at the graphics, the same as I remember thinking DOOM was WAY too scary for me to play. (I still tried, of course.) Recently, GitHub's huge Game Off game jam announced its theme would be "throwback," which immediately made my mind go to those early experiences I had with FPS games. I immediately started researching that era of computer games, and found myself playing a couple that had passed me by at the time. I was inspired, and so I decided to make my own homage to those bad-ass games as best I could. Thus: BAD VIBES.

This is my love letter (albeit a fairly rushed one) to '90s-era first-person shooters, as well as the cultural zeitgeist they inhabited. You're in a strange maze on some psychedelic alien world, where you have to run around finding keys and vaporizing the bad vibes before they wipe you out. The longer you survive, the more baddies you crush, the higher your score. And all of this is set to archival hip-hop and jungle music actually made in the '90s. I think any of you that lived through or appreciate that era will get a kick out of it. Or at least I hope you will. :P

You can play BAD VIBES for free on Mac or Windows. Thanks for reading!

I love the old-skool corridor and maze-like shooters. id Software were the kings (naturally, given they defined the genre) of these games. I played through Wolfenstein, Doom, Doom 2, Quake and Quake 2 and loved them all.

I, too, made a Quake inspired shooter and it's good to see that I'm not the only one inspired by what we had in the 90's!

Hey everyone! A quick heads up that BAD VIBES just got a fairly sizable update. A new enemy was added, some control tweaks were made, and I added a persistent high scores system, both to the game and to a global leaderboard. My highest is currently 725, and I'm dying to see if anyone else can figure out how to kick me out of the top.